Focus areas of our autumn program 2012 are architecture, design, art, and photography.

In the manifesto The City in the City – Berlin: A Green Archipelago, Oswald Mathias Ungers and a number of his colleagues from Cornell University presented the first concepts and intellectual models for the shrinking city. In contrast to the reconstruction of the European city that was popular at the time, they developed the figure of a polycentric urban landscape. However, the manifesto really began to exert an effect beginning in the 1990s onwards, when the focus of the urban planning discourse turned to the examination of crises, recessions, and the phenomenon of demographic shrinking. This critical edition contains a previously unpublished version of the manifesto by Rem Koolhaas, as well as interviews with co-authors Rem Koolhaas, Peter Riemann, Hans Kollhoff, and Arthur Ovaska. Introductory texts explain the development of the manifesto between Cornell and Berlin, position the work in the planning history of Berlin, and reveal its influence on current approaches.

The Typografische Monatsblätter is one of the most important journals to successfully disseminate the phenomenon of “Swiss typography” to an international audience. With more than 70 years in existence, the journal witnessed significant moments in the history of typography and graphic design. 30 Years of Swiss Typographic Discourse in the Typografische Monatsblätter examines the years 1960–90, that correspond to a period of transition in which many factors such as technology, socio-political contexts and aesthetic ideologies profoundly affected and transformed the fields of typography and graphic design. The book includes a large number of works from well -known and lesser -known designers such as Emil Ruder, Helmut Schmid, Wolfgang Weingart, Hans-Rudolf Lutz, Jost Hochuli and many others.

In Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer Tim Benton reflects on the famous architect’s use of photography, starting with the young Charles-Edouard Jeanneret’s attempts to take professional photographs during his travels in central Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, Greece, and Italy. While Le Corbusier always claimed that he saw no virtue in taking photographs, he actually bought three cameras and took several hundred photographs between 1907 and 1917, many of them of publishable quality. In 1936 he acquired a 16mm movie camera and took 120 sequences of film and nearly 6,000 photographs with it.

This previously unpublished material is the basis for the publication. It reveals Le Corbusier to be a sensitive and brilliant manipulator of a wide range of photographic styles. Le Corbusier: Secret Photographer provides dramatically new insights into Le Corbusier’s visual imagination, his changing attitudes towards nature and materials in the 1930s, and his distrust of progress.

Please Don’t Brand My Public Space is a critical investigation of the visual strategies employed to identify and brand political spaces. Isn’t it about time to look at their often banal images as part of a crisis of political representation? In the context of a revival of xenophobic propaganda on the one hand and the degradation of places into pure marketing products on the other, it is possible to recognize an increasingly theatrical, unquestioned production of public signs and symbols. Contributions on the theme by political scientists, designers, and sociologists make reference to the three visual essays that are at the heart of the book: “The Noticeable Absence of a Flag of the Earth” by Ruedi Baur, “Depictions of Federalism and Nationalism: Comparing Former Yugoslavia, Switzerland, and Belgium” by Irena Bockaj, and “ European Capitals in Competition” by Maria Roskowska. The publication is released in collaboration with Civic City ( HEAD Genève ) and the research program “Écrire la ville ” ( Ensadlab, Paris ).

British architect Nicholas Hawksmoor (approx. 1661–1736) is recognized as one of the major contributors to the traditions of British and European architectural culture. Nevertheless, there is insufficient visual documentation and analysis of his work. Nicholas Hawksmoor: Seven Churches for London reconsiders his architecture in relation to urbanism. The publication focuses on a series of important London churches the architect designed during the early part of the eighteenth century. The key distinguishing features of these churches are their spires, each designed with different qualities and motifs. While Hawksmoor was inspired by the ancient history of architecture, his work was considered radical and contemporary in its day.

Photographer Hélène Binet was specially commissioned to document the various aspects of the seven remaining London churches. Her immaculate black and white photographs demonstrate the beauty of Hawksmoor’s architecture with special attention to the variety of scales, sites, interiors, textures, and materials.

The special exhibition Die gute Form, put on by the Swiss Werkbund (SWB) at the Basel trade fair in 1949, was an event that caused a furor far beyond Switzerland’s borders. The renowned architect, designer, and graphic artist Max Bill was the mastermind behind the idea and personally selected the exhibits and designed their setting. Eighty exhibition panels showed consumer objects of exemplary design, from a teacup to the jet plane. Bill recognized the emerging, American-style commodity aesthetic that was making inroads into Switzerland and postwar Europe and sought to confront it with a specifically “Swiss” aesthetic shaped by a desire to create long-lasting forms.
This publication documents Bill’s initiative by presenting the 80 original exhibition panels, which are part of the design collection at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, and Ernst Scheidegger’s photographs of the installation places this famous design show in a theoretical and design-historical context, examines its background, and creates a link to the publishing house’s first publication from 1983.

From Spaces to Spaces is the latest publication by the artist Felice Varini, constituting a re-examination of his complete oeuvre based on his most recent works.

His fascinating spatial installations make use of urban landscapes, walls, and rooms as “screens” for abstract graphical projections which the artist paints, draws, or fabricates from materials such as adhesive tape. Seen from an ideal vantage point, they appear as unexpected two-dimensional patterns against their three-dimensional background. When the viewer then leaves this vantage point and moves through the space, he sees the work as a perpetual metamorphosis of shifting, evolving forms. Accompanying the numerous illustrations is a text by Doris von Drathen that situates the work in its art-historical context, as well as an interview she conducted with the artist.

“Democracy is the worst form of government — except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Challenging Democracy tries to get to the bottom of the dilemma expressed in this world-famous quote from Winston Churchill. Designed as a visual reader that makes targeted use of the communicative power of the image, the book constitutes a comprehensive compendium on the history, development, and current debates on democracy. Are democracies more capable than other forms of government? What role is played today by digital media in democracies and democratization processes? Is globalization conducive to democracy? What forms of democracy are there? The visual reader delves into both fundamental and more topical issues and thus provides the key to a comprehensive understanding and an in-depth engagement with democracy from its origins to the present day.

With contributions by André Bächtiger, Thomas Bernauer, Daniel Bochsler, Florin Büchel, Francis Cheneval, Frank Esser, Regula Hänggli, Jürg Helbling, Erik Jentges, Hanspeter Kriesi, Daniel Kübler, Andreas Ladner, Sandra Lavenex, Wolfgang
Merkel, Frank Schimmelfennig, Marco Steenbergen, Manuel Vogt.

HANSPETER KRIESI is holder of the Stein Rokkan Chair in comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence.

Double includes a group of artists, architects, critics, historians and theorists, discussing the effects, desires and implications in the act of doubling and replicating. Society has constantly regulated the act of copying. Almost as an instinctual impulse towards originality, the desire and need for constant innovation has been protected throughout history with public shame, bureaucratic forms or even trials. Investigating the issues of sameness and difference, this compilation of manifestos explores the possibilities embedded in the act of copying, opening a path for learning by copying, and ultimately copying better.

Struggles to escape form as a manifestation of various norms and constraints are as old as architecture itself. But the formless is also increasingly in the air today, explicitly as in discussions of the “formless” quality of the city, and implicitly in talk of atmospheric buildings, randomized structures, and the dematerialization (or increased mediation) of architecture. No doubt part of its appeal lies in the fact that he formless is frequently found at the intersections between architecture and other fields, from art to ecology or engineering. Nevertheless, the formless has not yet been theorized rigorously in architecture. It seems to underpin a wide range of tendencies that have not yet been connected, or even explicitly acknowledged or identifi ed. This book represents a fi rst step toward this articulation.r.

The Mediterranean Sea not only separates two geographic continents, but has always been a complex crossroads between divergent social, economic, and political spheres. Mittelmeerland examines this many-sided region, showing how current and future developments and challenges manifest themselves here on both land and water. The book investigates on ten port cities: Alexandria, Algiers, Barcelona, Beirut, Dubrovnik, Haifa, Istanbul, Marseille, Tangier, and Tripolis. An essay provides an overview of the cartographic history of the Mediterranean region, and numerous drawings visualize the spatial transformation processes and territorial relationships between water, land, and ports.

Religious communities inscribe themselves into the cityscape not only socially and politically, but also acoustically and architecturally. Global Prayers examines the mutual influence of religion and urbanism, looking at how various forms of faith manifest themselves in the cities of the world. Photo essays, interviews, reports, scientific texts, and artistic photo spreads inquire into the making of urban religion and the production of religious urbanity.

With contributions by Nezar AlSayyad, Filip de Boeck, Hengameh Golestan, Brian Larkin, Aernout Mik, Werner Schiffauer, AbdouMaliq Simone, Camilo José Vergara,
Paola Yacoub.

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture was established by His Highness the Aga Khan in 1977 to identify and encourage excellence in architecture and other forms of intervention in the built environment of societies with a Muslim presence. The award is given every three years and recognizes all types of building projects that affect today’s built environment. Smaller projects are given equal consideration as large-scale buildings. Richly illustrated and with explanatory texts, the book presents this year’s shortlist and the award recipients. This year’s topic is centered around the relationship between life and architecture. Numerous essays examine how architecture interacts with the life of people who inhabit it.

With Apple, Ken Miki playfully presents a complete basic course in visual communication — all based on a simple and familiar object: the apple. First, all five senses are activated in a step-by-step analysis of the apple by touching, looking at, smelling, tasting and listening to the sound of eating it. The apple is then used to illustrate the topics of form, color, size, surface, texture, writing, line, body and text — the fundamental elements a designer works with. Addressing each theme based on this everyday object enables a playful approach that also makes for highly effective learning. A unique textbook that offers inspiration and food for thought for both experienced graphic artists and those less familiar with the world of design.

First Cuts shows 15 photographic appropriations that artist Harald F. Müller realized for the first time in Switzerland’s tallest building: the Prime Tower in Zürich, designed by architects Gigon/Guyer. Applied by means of a perforated grid onto soundabsorbing metal panels on the building’s interior walls, the re-photographed motifs depict a series of “firsts” from the worlds of technology, sports, and culture. Evoking nostalgia for human faith in progress, they also point with their references to CERN and Constructivism to cutting-edge research and timeless modernity. These artworks refuse to fulfil merely a passive decorative function, making instead their own architecture-related statement. The book follows the same principle by invoking cosmological references and presenting itself as an independent work rather than merely explaining and illustrating. Essays by Gerd Blum and Johan Frederik Hartle describe the role First Cuts played in the development of Harald F. Müller’s oeuvre, focusing on abstraction and atomism.

Embracing that which could dominate us—the city, infrastructure and overpopulation—has been part of the process of Steven Holl Architects as the office has taken on work of increasing complexity and scale in China over the past decade.
The projects featured in this book play a serious game with scale and the dynamic between micro and macro. There is no in-between, no easy hybridity, but a study of contrasting and nested scales that acknowledge the fact that the city-dweller’s perception across a given day necessarily morphs from micro to macro in cycles.
In content and format the book reflects such juxtaposition, featuring large format images and graphic documentation of Steven Holl’s recent works realized in China alongside critiques and analyses offered by a new generation of theorists. Its pages are considered sites capable of handling plurality, contradiction and excess. It reads like the passing views from a commuter train and looks like a rough script for a new notion of urbanism.

CHRISTOPH a. KUMPUSCH is a New York-based architect and the principal of Foraward slash (/) c.a.k Productions. He is a professor of architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; and Pratt
Institute.

STEVEN HOLL, born 1947, is an American architect, perhaps best known for the 1998 Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland, the 2003 Simmons Hall at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the praised 2009 Linked Hybrid mixeduse complex in Beijing, China.

Is democracy spatial? How are the physical aspects of our cities, houses, streets, and public spaces—the borders, the neighborhoods, the monuments—bearers of our values? In a world of intensifying geo-economic integration, extreme financial and geopolitical volatility, deepening environmental crises, and a dramatic new wave of popular protest against both authoritarian government and capitalist speculation, cities have become leading sites for new claims on state power and new formations of political subjectivity. This volume brings together perspectives from history, sociology, art, political theory, planning, law, and design practice to explore the urban spaces of the political. A selection of contemporary photography from around the world offers a visual refl ection of this timely investigation.

Contributors include: Michael Arad, Diane Davis, Keller Easterling, Gerald Frug, Mohsen Mostafavi, Chantal Mouffe, Erika Naginski, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, Loïc Wacquant, Krzysztof Wodiczko.

MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI, an architect and educator, is the Dean of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design.

Nairobi, in its short history spanning just over one hundred years, has grown to be one of the most varied and international cities of our contemporary world. Migration has been shown as one of the key forces infl uencing the city. In the context of Nairobi’s complex colonial and postindependence political trajectory, migration has reinforced ethnic, spatial, and economic differences, leading to the formation of multiple power structures. This process is evident in the city’s radically different urban patterns. The book documents, along specific neighborhoods, how different cultures of urban life constitute the city today.

For most people locations that hold a particular importance for the development of our society and for the advancement of science and technology remain hidden from view. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is best known
for its giant particle accelerator. Here researchers take part in a diverse array of fundamental physical research, in the pursuit of knowledge that will perhaps one day revolutionize our understanding of the universe and life on our planet. The Swiss photographer Andri Pol mixed with this multicultural community of researchers and followed their work over an extended period of time. In doing so he created a unique portrait of this fascinating “underworld.” The cutting-edge research is given a human face and the pictures allow us to perceive how in this world of the tiniest particles the biggest connections are searched for. With an essay by Peter Stamm.

Is there such a thing as “pure black”? In this book, Katrin Trautwein shows us how many shades of gray and different pigments can go into creating this special color, to which countless meanings are attached both in Western culture and other parts of the world. By means of high-grade screen prints, the publication makes the wide range of blacks tangible to the reader, belying the notion that black is the mere absence of light. On the contrary, the different black tones are uniquely suited to emphasizing nuances in lightness and darkness. These are the shades that create moods within architecture. A room can be designed without color, but not without light and shadow – without them, it would have no form. The fascinating palette of black tones is accompanied by an essay that illuminates the subject from different perspectives.

During the Renaissance, the contest to decide the order of rank among the fine arts, architecture, painting, and sculpture was an issue that also occupied the famous architect Andrea Palladio. He was convinced that architecture spoke for itself and did not require any ornamentation through painting. Nevertheless, frescos adorn the walls and ceilings of many of his villas. At the Villa Malcontenta, for example, one of Venice’s best-known fresco painters of the day, Giovanni Battista Zelotti, was commissioned to design the interior. In Frescos, Antonio Foscari analyzes this fresco cycle, one that not only represents an outstanding example of trompe l’oeil based on architectural structures – and which is closely modeled on Palladio’s ideals – but also sheds light on formative events within the family that commissioned Palladio. This publication contains a wealth of historical documents as well as photographs of the frescos by Matthias Schaller.

Genealogy of Modern Architecture is a reference work on modern architecture by Kenneth Frampton, one of today’s leading architectural theorists. Conceived as a genealogy of twentieth century architecture from 1924 to 2000, it compiles some sixteen comparative analyses of canonical modern buildings ranging from exhibition pavilions and private houses to office buildings and various kinds of public institutions. The buildings are compared in terms of their hierarchical spatial order, circulation structure and referential details. The analyses are organized so as to show what is similar and different between two paired types, thus revealing how modern tradition has been diversely inflected. Richly illustrated, Genealogy of Modern Architecture is a new standard work in architectural education.

KENNETH FRAMPTON, born 1930, is one of the world’s most renowned architectural theorists, the author of the world best seller Modern Architecture: A Critical History, and a professor at Columbia University, New York.

Amateur Attitude examines the recent work of the Chinese architect Wang Shu, Pritzker Prize winner in 2012. Exhibiting a contemporary aesthetic, the architect’s buildings show his intense engagement with their setting and its history, coupled
with a reliance on traditional building techniques. He often reuses materials from city districts that have been torn down. This approach is based on a critical attitude toward the kind of overly rationalized architecture being built today in many of the world’s cities, where effi ciency seems to be the primary watchword. Wang Shu’s architecture reveals instead a thoughtful attitude toward both design and implementation, as well as the ability to react flexibly to the context of a particular site – something he characterizes as an “Amateur Attitude.” The essays place the architect’s work in its contemporary context, while extensive illustrations provide exclusive insights into his varied creative work.

WANG SHU was born in 1963 in the province of Xinjiang, China. He founded his architecture office Amateur Architecture Studio in 1997. In 2012, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize.

KENNETH FRAMPTON, born 1930, is one of the world’s most renowned architectural theorists, the author of the world best seller Modern Architecture: A Critical History, and a professor at Columbia University, New York.

ARIC CHEN, born 1974, is an author, critic, and the curator of design and architecture of the new M+ Museum for Visual Culture in Hong Kong.

In front of the backdrop of recent disasters Kenya Hara founded the platform “house vision” in order to contemplate possible new ways of living in the post-industrial age, while at the same time combining sustainable architecture with the latest technology. Containing essays by renowned architects and artists, House Vision continues where the eponymous exhibition left off. Toyo Ito, the winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize, develops a vision of a house for a nostalgic future. Sou Fujimoto invents a “Powerhouse,” which unites all electronic applications in itself; the flower artist Makoto Azuma designs walls with plants, and Hiroshi Sugimoto invokes native materials, using them to design futuristic ways of living. This publication sheds light on this Japanese project from a western standpoint, offering generally applicable ideas for architecture and life in the future.

With contributions by Makoto Azuma, Masataka Baba, Joshiaki Fujimori, Sou Fujimoto, Kenya Hara, Kunio Harimoto, Atsumi Hayashi, Hidemitsu Hori, Akira Ichikawa, Jun Inokuma, Toyo Ito, Masaaki Kanai, Norio Kanayama, Kengo Kuma, Muneaki Masuda, Toshiharu Naka, Yuri Naruse, Ban Shigeru, Hirokazu Suemitsu, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Naoya Toida, Sadao Tsuchiya, Riken Yamamoto, Hiroya Yoshizato.

KENYA HARA, born 1958, is a graphic designer, a professor at the Musashino Art University, and a consultant for communication design at Muji.

What is a city? What determines its specifi city? What shapes its quality? The evolution of the contemporary city does not follow a linear movement. It is shaped by transformation processes that are directed toward often distant and conflicting
goals. Even though cities are inscribed into global processes and networks, they develop their own specific ways of dealing with these conditions. They tend to produce and reproduce their own specificity, their own patterns and character traits.
Using the categories of territory, power, and difference — also lending the book its structure — the texts analyze different case studies of cities and urbanized territories, ranging from the Canary Islands to Hong Kong and Nairobi, unfolding the distinctiveness of their physical and social existences.

With contributions by Roger Diener, Mathias Gunz, Manuel Herz, Jacques Herzog, Rolf Jenni, Marcel Meili, Shadi Rahbaran, Christian Schmid, and Milica Topalovic.

The Air from Other Planets introduces an architecture built and controlled by amplifying and designing the energy within our electromagnetic, thermodynamic, acoustic, and chemical environment. This approach to design exchanges the walls and shells we have assumed to be the only type of attainable architecture for a range of material energies that develops its own shapes, aesthetics, organizational systems, and social experiences. Energy emerges as more than what fills the interior of buildings or reflects off its outer walls. Instead, it becomes its own enterprise for design innovation: it becomes the architecture itself. The Air from Other Planets is a book nostalgic for the future, rooted in the belief that the architect’s greatest attributes lie in the execution of the imagination, through speculations and projections of worlds and environments yet to exist.

The photo book Noonday can be regarded as a sequel to Annelies Štrba’s Shades of Time, published almost twenty years ago by Lars Müller Publishers. The photographs show intimate moments in the life of the artist’s family, everyday situations and seemingly insignificant moments captured on film. They confront the viewer with the human urge to remember and inability to forget as they evoke in his mind’s eye similar images and memories from his own past. While Shades of Time focused on Štrba’s own children, Noonday shows photographs of her grandchildren. The images display the children sleeping, in the forest or other places and thus preserve graceful moments of life. With a subjective and yet documentary gaze, Štrba halts the passing of time, oscillating between closeness and distance, relishing the moment recorded while cognizant of its ineluctable transience.

100 Years of Swiss Graphic Design takes a fresh look at Swiss typography and photo-graphics, posters, corporate image design, book design, journalism and typefaces over the past hundred years. With illuminating essays by prominent experts in the field and captivating illustrations, this book, designed by the Zürich studio NORM, presents the diversity of contemporary visual design while also tracing the fine lines of tradition that connect the work of different periods. The changes in generations and paradigms as manifested in their different visual languages and convictions are organized along a timeline as well as by theme. The various fields of endeavor and media are described, along with how they relate to advertising, art, and politics. Graphic design from Switzerland reflects both international trends and local concerns. High conceptual and formal quality, irony and wit are its constant companions. A new, comprehensive reference work on Swiss design.

With Essays by the editors and Hans-Rudolf Bosshard, Christoph Bignens, Max Bruinsma, Jürgen Döring, Meret Ernst, Ulrike Felsing, Roland Früh, Ariel Herbez, Richard Hollis, Martin Jaeggi, Andres Janser, Roxane Jubert, Urs Lehni, Claude Lichtenstein, Kerry William Purcell, François Rappo, Jörg Stürzebecher, and Ruedi Widmer.

Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) remains one of the leading landscape architects ever. The significance of his landscape design lies in his use of abstract shapes that rarely employ symmetry, and his use of tropical, mainly Brazilian, flora. His distinctive and widely acclaimed work has been featured and referenced in numerous sources, yet few of Burle Marx’s own words have been published. This book of previously unpublished lectures fills this void. The lectures, delivered on international speaking tours, address topics such as: “The Garden as an Art in Living,” “Gardens and Ecology,” and “The Problem of Garden Lighting.” Their timely publication helps shed light on Burle Marx’s distinctive style and ethos of landscape as a way of life.

GARETH DOHERTY is lecturer in landscape architecture and urban planning and design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Josef Müller-Brockmann’s graphics left a lasting mark on Swiss visual communication from the 1950s onward. His posters demonstrate how a sober, formally reduced language works best for conveying a universal, timeless message. Poster campaigns for longtime clients such as the Tonhalle concert hall in Zürich or the Automobile Club of Switzerland follow strict functional criteria–and yet exhibit a variety of design solutions and exciting, dynamic compositions.

This book presents selected posters by Müller-Brockmann and places them in the context of their own time while also examining the validity of his solutions from today’s point of view.

Over the past two decades, Olafur Eliasson has regularly traveled to Iceland to photograph the island’s landscape and natural phenomena. This ambitious, on-going venture—almost cartographical in its scope—has resulted in approximately eighty photo series to date and a plethora of individual photographs of glaciers, waterfalls, rainbows, sunrises, volcanoes, and geysers. Far from only documenting the world, Eliasson’s vibrant images reflect on our relationship to nature and our physical existence within space.

An artwork in its own right, this book presents Eliasson’s highly personal selection of full-color images from his immense body of work, granting the reader a rare peek into a significant source of inspiration for much of the artist’s work in other media — the Icelandic landscape.

Inspired by the architects’ tradition of passing on experience in conversation form, this paperback book provides insights into the ideas, methods, and memories of one of Europe’s most innovative landscape architects. In twelve concise conversations, Vogt inquires into the meaning of landscape architecture in the context of the worldwide urbanization process, and tries to define this young discipline’s position. To this day, our concept of landscape appears to be influenced by an Arcadian ideal. Only when landscapes are understood on several levels, as the product of natural, cultural, and social processes, can atmospheric and living urban landscapes appropriate to the specific situation be created. Günther Vogt sees landscape architecture decidedly as part of a city, given its close relationship to topography, architecture, and infrastructure.

Baku: Oil and Urbanism is the first architectural study of the relationship between oil and urbanism. Its focus is Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan and formerly part of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union. Since the late 19th century, oil and urbanism have been intertwined in the spaces of the city. Later, Baku was the site of one of the most spectacular experiments in Soviet urban and infrastructural design­—“Neft Dashlari,” the first off-shore drilling facility in the world, a city built on trestles in the Caspian Sea. Today, Baku is undergoing its second major oil boom. The book examines how urban design, planning, and architecture have dealt with the issue of oil in varying political conditions. Working with maps and archival photographs, the book analyzes sites, buildings, urban fabric, plans to understand the evolution of the city.

Zaha Hadid: Heydar Aliyev Centre is devoted to the new cultural center designed by Zaha Hadid in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku. As one of the most important cultural centers in the country, the building houses a variety of institutions under one roof. With the design, the renowned architect won the architecture competition in 2007. Inside its surface of fiberglass-reinforced concrete the building contains an auditorium that seats over a thousand, a conference center, a museum, and a library. Its open, inviting, and curvilinear design, which picks up and expands on forms from the surrounding environment, strongly differentiates the building from the city’s monumental architecture of the Soviet era.

Photographs by Hélène Binet and Iwan Baan display the building in all of its facets, making it possible for the reader to experience its formal, haptic, and spatial qualities. Essays explain conceptual and technical aspects of this impressive piece of architecture.

ZAHA HADID, born in 1950 in Baghdad, is one of the most influential architects of our time. Her international breakthrough came with the Vitra Fire Station in Weil am Rhein. Among her most recent buildings are the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, the MAXXI Museum of Art in Rome, and the Guangzhou Opera House. She was the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize (2004). Hadid lives and works in London.